The Primordial Weapon

[Proto Man]

In a veritable whirlwind, the entire dynamic had shifted.

Whirda and Proto Man were no longer standing by themselves in the shadow of a colossal force of nature. They were no longer alone against an unstoppable mass of horns, scales, and claws.

Battle had been joined, and from the looks of it, the war had only just begun. With a focused agenda, the leader of the new arrivals had launched himself at the beast, and despite the suicidal implications of such actions, he had succeeded in this headstrong plan. Smoke and molten blood escaped from the wounds the creature now bore on its side, and the man, after climbing up to his feet and wiping the blood from his chin, grinned smugly at the ancient beast.

In the chaos that had been Dio’s initial assault, the rest of the group had been forced apart in a wild attempt to avoid the shockwaves and the force of the explosions that ruptured the creature’s hide. Proto Man found himself half-buried under one of the few remaining structures left in the abandoned village. Somewhere above the mass of wood and dried reeds, Proto Man heard another roar as the ground shook.

“Do you still live?” The rough voice waited for no answer as the material above the android was knocked away in a succession of swift kicks. The figure that owned the voice was a gruff-looking man in very dated armor, as if he’d been pulled out of a picture book from an elementary history class…

It was then that the info blurb appeared on the android’s internal display.

“Wait,” Proto Man muttered as the man bent down and hoisted him up to his feet as if he weighed nothing. “It’s Atelos, isn’t it?”

“And you’re Blues,” the Spartan shot back as he pulled the shield from his back and glanced over his shoulder at the Tarrasque. “Now that we’ve established that, we have bigger issues.” Somewhere in the distance, Proto Man heard a shout and watched as two people attacked the monster with what seemed to be half-frozen jets of water. Another individual appeared to be fiddling with more explosives. In response, the lumbering monster dispelled the pair with a stomp that shook the landscape, fissuring the earth from the point of impact.

“Where is Whirda?” Proto Man asked as he readied the Proto Buster and started at the creature.

Atelos, who remembered the wallop that the child possessed from their run-in with the monsters outside Silent Hill, thought nothing of the fact that a ten-year-old was marching at such a creature. “The infected woman?” The Spartan inquired as he moved to catch up to the preteen robot. “Haven’t seen her since Dio wounded the creature.”

That meant she was somewhere. Perhaps she was lurking in the shadows and biding her time. In their short time together, Proto Man knew that to be the woman’s modus operandi. Her skills were their most refined when she had surprise and the benefit of picking her windows of opportunity.

Unfortunately, Proto Man was nothing like that.

With the barrel of his weapon shuddering as the energy built inside, the Prototype Robot Master strode across the collapsed, smoldering remnants of the village’s main thoroughfare and leveled his gaze with the creature at the other end. Targeting reticles popped up as his system continued its analysis of the Tarrasque—crunching numbers and processing visual information as quickly as it could. Somewhere off to his left, Proto Man heard shouting, but the words were drowned out by all the other noise. Up ahead, the two individuals who used the elements to their favor fell away as a giant limb cleaved through the hardened dirt as if it were sand.

Swinging up his gun arm and supporting it with his other hand, Proto Man grinned beneath the shadow of his visor and fired. Although it lacked the pizzazz of a series of linked explosions, the discharge of energy from the Proto Buster erupted forth like a bolt of lightning, searing through the air before connecting against the creature’s face with a deafening boom and a flash of light that momentarily blinded everyone else.

When the light faded and the ringing in everyone’s ears faded, the unfortunate reality of the situation set in just a little bit more. There was a scar, that’s for sure—a large and blackened one that adorned much of the Tarrasque’s cheek. Other than that?

Nothing.

Now ignoring the warriors beneath it, the monster’s focus was on the child who wouldn’t back down, even as the Tarrasque lowered its head, dropped open its massive jaws, and let out a roar with enough force to uproot and clear anything that even remotely resembled a standing structure. When the creature’s jaw shut and it reared its head back up, it burst forward as if it were spring-loaded. A shadow fell over the android, and a moment later, a palm came crashing down at him.

Never one who backed down, Proto Man threw up his hands and summarily vanished from sight when the Tarrasque’s house-sized hand slammed into the ground. For those individuals close enough to see the impact, there was a slight moment of resistance in that instant before the scaled limb hit dirt, causing the earth itself to buckled under the blast. In that instant, a blurred shadow flickered as a figure darted and skipped up the scaled appendage.

With a growl, the Spartan Atelos leapt into the air—shield and spear at the ready—and landed on the creature’s hand. Although his strength was unmatched, the thrust intended to bury the bladed end of the polearm into the Tarrasque’s hand resulted in the weapon shattering apart on impact. A frustrated growl escaped the Spartan’s mouth as he discarded the ruined weapon and glared up at his foe’s visage. “Does this amuse you, Monster?” The aura around Atelos’ body burned red as he stepped forward and hurtled his shield like a discus at the creature’s face. His aim true, the Spartan watched as his shield slammed against one of the Tarrasque’s eyes, causing it to let out a rumbling roar and reel its head away. Before Atelos had a chance to revel, the surface he stood upon started to move up, and it was then that he realized he still stood on its hand. With no weapon and his shield on the ground beneath him, the Grecian did what anyone would do—he held on for dear life. As the hand lifted up, he spotted something that elicited a mixture of shock and relief.

Yards below him, at the bottom of a vaguely palm-shaped crater, a red fist punched up through the compressed dirt.

With a groan, Proto Man grabbed hold of solid ground and pulled himself up out of the little grave that he’d been forced down into. He lay there for a few moments as his systems ran through the remaining diagnostics. His shock absorbers, both those in his shins and forearms, were blown from the act of resisting the creature’s effort to smash him into a puddle of smashed steel and robot fluids. A somewhat passive aggressive textbox indicated that, had the ground been denser, it wouldn’t have yielded beneath him in such a manner to prevent him from being crushed.

Scrambling up to the lip of the crater, Proto Man glanced around. The three warriors who had accompanied Dio looked a little shell-shocked—their focus on a partially ruined pile of explosives a few yards away. Knowing that they’d sort out their own situation, the android set his attention on the shield half-buried in the soil. A look up showed him that it’s owner was on the creature’s hand, which know was now moving a little too close to its mouth for comfort.

Although his legs still had some kinks to sort out, Proto Man half-hopped, half-shambled over to the shield and tore it up out of the ground. Although it was larger than his entire body and weighed probably half as much, it made no difference to the synthetic limbs of the robot youth. Holding up the shield, Proto Man eyed the two straps that would be fitted around the Spartan’s heavily corded arm muscles. Stepping through the bottom strap, the robot slipped the top on over his head and one shoulder, as if it were a seat belt. It was a little awkward with the metal grip behind his helmet, but Proto Man would live with it for the time being.

His eyes not set up, the android broke into a clumsy sprint, and it wasn’t until a few paces before his leap that the stride returned to his step. From a few yards away, the leader of the other warriors watched curiously as the little machine launched himself up at the monster. Although damaged, the mechanisms in his legs still had enough juice to propel his preteen-sized body high enough to grab onto one of the monster’s nails as it lifted its hand up near its face.

Atelos, whose angry eyes remained glued on the monsters, remained oblivious as the child scrambled up behind him. The Spartan’s aura blazed high like a funeral pyre—no monster was going to intimidate this warrior. With another thunderous roar, the Tarrasque made to throw Atelos into his mouth, but before it could, there was a flash above its head as a lithe figure swooped down from the mess of horns and hardened flesh above its head. Running down the vertical surface, Whirda dropped into a ninety degree baseball slide and drove the shade’s dagger into the creature’s already injured eye. When the blade hit the bottom of the creature’s eye socket, Whirda planted her feet on its cheek and kicked off—her shadow-afflicted body becoming a missile until she hit the creature’s hand and rolled up into a standing position.

“Run.” She whispered as she rushed off toward its arm in an attempt to get some distance before the wounded, angry force of nature remembered they were all within fifteen yards of its mouth. Atelos, who hadn’t expected the woman to materialize from seemingly nowhere, now turned around to see a battered, dirt-caked Proto Man holding his shield.

“This is yours,” the preteen machine replied as he tossed the heavy chunk of wood and bronze at its owner, who caught it and slipped it seamlessly over his arm, as if he’d done so a thousand times before. “Now you better listen to the lady.”

“What will you do?” Atelos inquired, even as he saw the barrel of the boy’s weapon glow blue with energy.

“What I do,” Proto Man shouted as he ran passed the Spartan, dropped to a knee, and fired the charged blast at the face of the creature. He aimed for the scorched patch he had created earlier, and this time, the shot tore through the reinforced hide of the monster, eliciting fresh roars of anger as its lava-like blood started to bubble and seep out of the wound. Before either robotic youth or Spartan could appreciate the wounds worn by the beast, they were both knocked clean from it by a rapid and breath-stealing smack from its other hand.

Amid the descent, the Protoype Robot Master continued to build a charge in the Proto Buster. As he neared the earth at the tail-end of the multi-story plunge, he twisted his body and discharged the blast into ground underneath him. The reaction force of the blast colliding with the soil was enough to negate most of the speed with which his metal body had been accumulated during the fall, and once the energy faded away, he smacked the ground without sustaining any painful bumps or bruises.

Rising up to a vertical position, Proto Man looked up to see that the Tarrasque, even as it trickled magma from fresh wounds, didn’t seem to waver as it now turned its attention to the quartet from the depths of the Moors. Dio and his associates had their own plans, and while they’d been set back, they were still trying to stay the course.